BRUSSELS RESILIENCE FORUM

Major General (rtd) Professor Timothy John Hodgetts is a former Surgeon General of the UK Armed Forces and specialised in emergency medicine. He has held senior clinical and command roles across Defence, NATO, and the Army Medical Services. He served on operations in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Oman, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait. He led defence trauma governance for over a decade, and held key roles such as Defence Consultant Adviser in Emergency Medicine, Head of the Army Medical Services, and Chair of NATO’s COMEDS. An honorary professor of emergency medicine, he has published extensively, co-authored defence medical doctrine, and co-founded the citizenAID® charity.

Raed Arafat has served at Romania’s Ministry of Internal Affairs since 2014, a role in which he oversees national coordination of emergency situations across emergency departments. He also chairs the NATO Joint Health Group. In this role, he coordinates civil defence, medical resilience, and emergency planning across the alliance to adapt to the modern strategic context, threats, and crises.

Megan Challis has an extensive background in government relations, strategic partnerships, advocacy, and health policy. With experience in organisations such as the Wellcome Trust, the Meningitis Research Foundation, and the Department of Health and Social Care, Megan has held various leadership roles. Megan is also a board member at Meningitis Research Foundation and a Science Policy Fellow at Stiftung Mercator GmbH.

Former ambassador Vsevolod Chentsov has served as Head of the Mission of Ukraine to the EU and the European Atomic Energy Community since August 2021. A career diplomat with nearly 30 years of experience, he previously served as representative to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, and has acted since 2017 as Co-Agent of Ukraine before the International Court of Justice in the case of Ukraine v. Russian Federation.

Francesca Colombo is the Head of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Health Division. She leads OECD work on health, providing internationally comparable health data, conducting economic and data-driven analysis of health policies, and advising policymakers on how to make health systems more resilient and people-centred. Her portfolio covers health system resilience, health workforce, health spending and financial sustainability, healthcare quality, ageing and long-term care, public health economics, pharmaceutical policy, AI, and digital health. She is a member of the NUS-Lancet Pandemic Readiness, Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation Commission on COVID-19, the World Health Summit Council, and the UK Health Foundation’s NHS Productivity Commission. She has also served as co-chair of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Health and Healthcare and as a member of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission. She has more than 25 years of experience leading international work on health and health systems.

Nikos Dedes is a health policy advocate with over 25 years of engagement in patient organisations. He is General Secretary of the Greek Patients’ Association, Chair of Positive Voice, the Greek association of people living with human immunodeficiency virus, Vice-Chair of the European AIDS Treatment Group, and Board Member of the European Patients’ Forum. He has served on the Management Board of the European Medicines Agency